A Secret About the Body

If I draw my shoulders back, I return them to where they were before I learned to slump over devices and plates of spaghetti, before I learned to make myself smaller and take up less space.

With shoulders back where they were designed to be, the pectorals, those grand muscles that spread like fans across the chest, are not just lengthened. They are downright regal.

Then, all these other bits and pieces fall into alignment. The spine elongates, the neck draws up, the bank account filleth over (not true). It is posture and position. But more than that, it’s power - that lifts up and ennobles.

The secret living in that rich, dark chamber of chest muscle and bone is that it’s hard not to feel strong when we’re holding our body as it is intended to be held. As it was before it met the spine-curling, shoulder-hunching, neck-slumping forces of smartphones and everyday stresses.

There are other things we can do: speak from our chest, breathe from our diaphragm, uncross our legs and arms.

Those are rock-solid individual efforts. What I love about the chest area, though, is that stretching it up and out can create a complimentary domino effect for the rest of the body.

And I find that I am not hunched, curled, slumped to my day, but open to it. Which is one elevating form of power.

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